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Growing up in 1970s Bridgend, I was never not going to love rugby. Quite apart from the lore of a grandfather who once came close to being picked for the Welsh squad, my first decade was punctuated by watching the regular triumphs of Wales’s rugby team.
For a principality of almost 3mn people, it was a glorious era. The team embodied and inspired the nation.
More than anyone, perhaps, JPR Williams, who has died at the age of 74 after a short illness, was the icon of that national pride. He was the beating heart of the 1970s team — a brilliant, creative, aggressive full-back who won 55 caps for Wales, and eight for the British and Irish Lions, and forever changed the way the game was played.
That he was a Bridgend player, too, made me feel like my home town was at the centre of things. This nondescript market town was also a crucible of Wales’s rugby triumphs. It felt good growing up in the glow of JPR Williams.
“He put Bridgend on the map and inspired me as a young boy,” says Rob Howley, a contemporary of mine at school who went on to have his own glittering career as a Welsh national player and coach. “JPR left a footprint for future generations. He was the best full-back in world rugby. He transcended nations.”
JPR, as he is universally known, was born John Peter Rhys Williams. His parents, siblings and wife were all medics. And he juggled his career as an amateur rugby player (Rugby Union only turned professional in 1995) with his role as an orthopaedic surgeon. As he quipped in his 2006 autobiography, JPR Given the Breaks — My Life in Rugby: “I spent half my life breaking bones on the rugby field, then the other half putting them back together in the operating theatre.”
In his schooldays and beyond, JPR was sometimes seen as aloof. There was an Anglo-Welsh slant to his upbringing — he moved as a teenager from the Bridgend boys’ grammar school to the private Millfield school in Somerset, south-west England, where he excelled at tennis and squash as well as rugby. Later he studied at St Mary’s medical school in London and played for the prestigious London Welsh rugby club.
But there was no duality in his competitive instincts. Bill Beaumont, an illustrious captain of the England team of the time, recalls the buccaneering JPR with a wry chuckle: “England never beat Wales when JPR was playing.” That was partly down to gutsy determination but also a dazzling natural ability, which often saw him combine to great effect with fellow stars. When Gareth Edwards scored a try widely deemed the greatest ever, it began with a crucial pass from Williams.
“JPR invented the modern full-back,” says Beaumont. “Rather than the traditional role of being a kicker and a defensive player, he was quick, he could be a decoy, he kept you guessing. He was as strong on the attack as in defence.” That, in the view of his admirers, made him comparable with the greats of other sports — Michael Jordan in basketball or John McEnroe in tennis.
JPR was also a swashbuckling figure. He sported lambchop sideburns, a sweep of fashionably long hair and a headband. And he had the attitude to match. “He was a warrior,” says Jonathan Davies, the former international and now television commentator who counted himself as a longtime friend. JPR, Davies says, was known for his unshakeable self-belief. Once on a Welsh tour, he turned round to his room mate while shaving and declared: “I played really well today, didn’t I?”
His boldness extended to extraordinary mettle — dramatically evident when he had to leave the field to get 30 stitches in his cheek (administered by his father), after being deliberately stamped on. “He went off, had his stitches and came back and finished the game,” recalls Howley who watched that Bridgend-New Zealand match at the age of nine. “That was courage.”
The game has only got more physical, some would say dangerous, as players have got faster, bigger and stronger. In 2008, JPR famously declared that had he been starting out then, he would have plumped for a career in tennis, not rugby, for reasons of safety and money.
Money, nonetheless, has come to rugby in swaths — but not always to good effect, says Davies. “Players are being paid too much [but] the money to bring coaches and youngsters into the game at the club level isn’t there. And the loyalty to the clubs has gone.”
That wasn’t the case for JPR, who played for Tondu village until his 50s, unheard of in such a physical sport, and who ended his life as president of Bridgend Ravens, the club where he began his career as an 18-year-old.
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